<Begin Segment 21>

TI: And so the next step was in November of '73, the JACL met and they scheduled you to present your information.

HM: Yeah, well they had too many activities in the months between the summer one and the November one, and Ben Nakagawa couldn't put me on the agenda. In fact, in the November one he went overtime like he normally does on these meetings and consequently he stated to the board there, that if anybody wanted to stick around and listen to Henry, they're welcome to do so. [Laughs]

TI: So explain that. So this was a evening meeting?

HM: Yeah.

TI: Was it kind of late? And so what time does the meeting start? And what time did he --

HM: Okay. It started off at seven o'clock, and here we were about nine-thirty I think it was. And then that's when he said hey, if anybody wanted to listen to Henry, stick around, otherwise, you're free to leave. So everybody left except Min Masuda, Shosuke Sasaki, Chuck Kato, Ken Nakano, and there was one other guy there. I forgot who he was.

TI: So how many were in the overall meeting? A couple dozen? Or...

HM: Oh yeah. We used to have pretty good turnouts. Maybe twenty-five people or something like that. It used to be a pretty good meeting.

TI: Okay, so after 9:30 twenty of them left and only about five stayed.

HM: Yeah. Oh, Eira Nagaoka stayed because he was the secretary and he wanted to take some notes on what was gonna transpire. And it was good that Eira stayed because he had another connecting factor to Japanese Baptist Church. So we went through the presentation and Min sat there, Min Masuda sat there and didn't say too much. So I covered all this material and then I went into the money process, the redress money process and how we're gonna put it into a trust fund and all this kind of junk. And Shosuke at that point -- well prior to that meeting Mike Nakata had told Shosuke if Mike was back from Groton, Connecticut, or wherever the heck he was, he was working as a Chief Welding Engineer for Todd Shipyards. And he told Shosuke, "Attend this meeting. This guy, he might be a nut, but he might be presenting some very interesting information."

TI: So was this Shosuke's first time at a JACL meeting? Or...

HM: No, no.

TI: ...or was he a member?

HM: He had been there before and Ben Nakagawa was trying to get him to agree to run as a commissioner for the FCC Commission, because of his communication skills and all that, and the fact that he was allied with the newspaper guild and other organizations. And in Shosuke's case, that was how he was able to get the word "Jap" out of the dictionary and all this newspaper publication stuff. But that was the first time I met Shosuke formally. He thought this bootstrap operation about having us put all the income tax that we paid, the Nikkei paid their income tax, we would be able to put it into a trust fund from which we would pay the oldest persons first, and then come down to the youngest individuals. And he thought this would get away from the problem of direct appropriations every year from Congress. And anyway, as it turned out, we made a pitch to Joel Pritchard who was the congressman in the north part of Seattle.

TI: This was, you mean one of the outcomes of after you presented, the five of you, you decided to go present this to Joel Pritchard?

HM: No. Tomio got wind of the thing because Tomio had kind of kept track of what we were doing, Koizumi and myself, and I had a chance to make a presentation personally to Tomio. And Tomio said well, hey, we should go see the congressman and see how he feels. And that's when we made the pitch to Joel Pritchard. He liked it. He said, "Man, this is something I could really support."

TI: And when you made the pitch to Joel, was it under the JACL organization that this pitch was made, or how was it presented?

HM: Oh, we said that we were a committee of the JACL. But, well, we couldn't get Ben to go along with the redress.

TI: Well, okay. So after you presented to those five, how did the information get to the larger membership of the JACL? Were you given another opportunity later on to show Ben and the others, or how did that happen?

HM: On the December meeting, Ben decided to table our issue. He was trying to put his own version into the redress process. He wanted all the monies to go into educational fund. He thought that was the most important thing. And I saw the merits of that because this is an educational process that has to continue. So I agreed with him and I said, "If there's unused funds, unclaimed funds, then we'll allocate it to the educational process." And in fact, even on the bill that eventually got through Congress, they did put in this educational thing, and that became the portion of the educational fund for redress. The five million bucks.

TI: But when Ben tables it, it's tabled so that your work wouldn't go forward to National? He wanted to -- what was he tabling? Because National is essentially asking for feedback at this point?

HM: Well, he wanted to tailor it to his own liking.

TI: Okay, so he wanted to tailor it, and then when it was to his liking, then submit it to National?

HM: Yeah.

TI: Is that the thinking?

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.